


Two of a Kind

by Cjcorrigan



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: F/M, Past Child Abuse, Pre-Canon, Pre-Relationship, tfcfansgive, tfcfansgive fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-10
Updated: 2017-07-10
Packaged: 2018-11-30 03:05:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11454666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cjcorrigan/pseuds/Cjcorrigan
Summary: Aaron realizes that in some ways, he and Katelyn are two of a kind. Or, the story of when Aaron meets the girl he'll one day fight for.Submission for tfcfansgive compilation!





	Two of a Kind

Aaron Minyard always assumed that he was too fucked up to love. It was the only thing that explained the way he’d always been treated, even by his own mother. As a result, when Andrew demanded that he promise not to become attached to anyone in return for his brother’s protection, he never expected for there to be a problem.

What he had never expected was her. She transferred into his advanced bio class, and seemed to be the only student who wasn’t scared to take the seat on the other end of Aaron’s lab table. By this time Aaron had carefully put together an aura that was somewhere between “Do I look like I give a shit what you did last weekend?” and “Caution: Materials May Be Explosive,” and no one had cared to choose that seat and risk being partnered with him for the whole semester.

But Katelyn didn’t even blink, didn’t hesitate to slide onto the stool, paying no mind to the confused looks their classmates were sharing. Aaron didn’t recall having seen her before, but guessed she must have been a vixen by the fact that he didn’t think anyone else had the school spirit to dye orange streaks into their naturally platinum blonde hair, a shade many girls would kill for. She turned to him with a smile and an innocent tilt to her head. “You don’t mind if I sit here, do you?”

Aaron shook his head and said more to his notebook than her, “You’re already there aren’t you? No real point in moving.”

They didn’t talk for another three weeks. It wasn’t until their first actual lab that they actually spoke. They had to dissect a frog and it took approximately two minutes for some foul smelling fluid to squirt up across his face as he was leaning to close to where he was cutting. Then he heard it: a soft snort and then the most beautiful laughter he’d ever heard. She wrinkled her nose when she laughed.

“I’m sorry, it’s just- you should see your face!” she managed to get out through her laughter. She grabbed the roll of paper towels they’d been given, took his chin in the other and began cleaning his face. Her eyes were a green behind her safety goggles. “It didn’t get in your mouth or anything did it?”

After that they had started studying together, and Aaron started noticing her on the vixens’ squad during games, clad in short skirts and fake fox ears. It was hard to tell when he began craving her presence. Was it when she blew him a good luck kiss before a game against the Jackals? Before that, when she whipped his ass in their midterm, making an A while he lagged behind with a B? It didn’t matter either way, because the end result was the same: Aaron was fucked.

He couldn’t date her. It would break Andrew’s deal, but more importantly she deserved someone better than him. But even still he found himself drawing lines, crossing them and then drawing new ones, each one closer to her, closer to something forbidden. It would be safe to study with her, but not to meet with her outside the library. But then again, it wouldn’t hurt to study in the campus café, as long as they were just studying, wouldn’t it?

It wasn’t until he found himself in her room, still studying, ever studying, that he realized he was already too far gone. He was sitting on her bed, memorizing the pictures of her and friends taped to her mirror. All the people in those pictures looked so happy and carefree, so different from all that he was.

She caught him staring, and said, “It’s not so perfect as it looks. The one in the corner- that was taken on one of the worst days of my life. You can tell I wasn’t actually smiling, because my mouth is closed.”

“Why do you keep it up then? Why do you want to remember it?”

“So I know how far I’ve come.”

From the corner of his eye, he caught the shadow of her hand in the air, somewhere by his head and shoulder, and he reflexively flinched away for a split second before he could school his features. That split second was enough, and she let her hand drop on the comforter between them.

“See?” she asked. “I think you just proved that we’re not so different after all.”

He hadn’t even noticed that while he looked at the pictures, she’d shrugged one of the shoulders to her t-shirt down. There, right below her left collar bone was a puckered scar, perfectly circular and shiny like a burn.

“It was a cigarette,” she told him. “My parents died when I was a baby, so I grew up with my extended family, being passed from one aunt to a grandparent, an older cousin, one after another until they all eventually got sick of me. One of my uncles did that.”

Aaron distantly felt sick. He wanted to apologize, wanted to hug her, wanted to kill the man who did it to her, but that’d make him a different twin than the one he was now. So he just said, “It was my mom. She… Andrew gave her a warning, not to hurt me, and she didn’t listen. So he killed her.”

Katelyn barely blinked when he said it. “Which means you can stop treating me like I’ll break if you touch me. We’re two of a kind.”

Aaron didn’t answer with words. He just put his hand over hers.

**Author's Note:**

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